Isn’t clothing the point? One would think so, but it hasn’t really been for a long time. “No More Drama” is fashion’s theme song du jour, at least in relation to what makes it down the runway. Here at Vogue.com, that’s produced a yearning for connection with designers who exhibit deeply personal points of view, and a nostalgia for the 1990s, before the corporatization of fashion, now in overdrive, started to take hold. This month Vogue Runway is celebrating four designers who knew the value of drama and humor on the runway—John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Vivienne Westwood, and Thierry (now Manfred) Mugler—by posting eleven of their most fun-filled 1990s collections.

Gaultier was one of the ’90s most influential designers, and rewatching this Spring 1995 show, it’s easy to see why. Fin de Siècle was a sartorial journey through 20th-century fashion. “My idea,” the designer told Vogue at the time, “was to take the typical look of each decade and synthesize them . . . to relive the spirit of elegance.” His approach, the magazine noted, was also informed “by the current craze for mixing vintage clothes with contemporary pieces,” a method that we now take for granted.

By the 1990s, Westwood had (mostly) put her pioneering punk aesthetic aside, while retaining her épater le bourgeois approach to fashion in shows like Anglomania (Fall 1993), On Liberty (Fall 1994), and Vive La Cocotte (Fall 1995). In all of these collections Westwood presented new, radical, and highly sexualized silhouettes, many with padded shoulders—and bums—inspired by her intense study of archival garments. “It’s just a question of adjusting the eyes,” Westwood told Vogue. “It’s only perverse because it is unexpected.”

If Westwood’s characters looked like they walked out of a 19th-century British novel, Galliano’s were even more exotic. He described the women in one of his 1993 collections as “magpies, stealing from different cultures.” Galliano combined historicism with extreme romanticism, spinning fantastical stories out of fragments of the past. The narrative, in fact, became as important as the clothes. Galliano “doesn’t just send mannequins down the runway, he gives you characters in costume, a plot, history, props,” wrote Vogue. Even when the shows started two hours late, people would wait.

At Mugler, the crowd happily sat through hour-long extravaganzas. His shows were often likened to cabarets, with special musical performances and casts that mixed the supers with celebrities of diverse ilk. Ivana Trump shared the catwalk with Nadja Auermann, and Dianne Brill mixed it up with Connie Girl, a trans star the designer discovered at Boy Bar in New York City. Whether they took the form of a robot, insect, or machine, Mugler’s models were glamorous and powerful—“strong personalities . . . never victims,” as one of his favorite models, Emma Sjöberg, remembers it.

These 11 shows gave us fashion drama of the best sort. They exhibit a certain freedom of creative expression, and most of them are fairly humorous, a quality that has largely been pushed aside as the industry has become increasingly corporatized. “We all know where the fun went,” says Danilo, a top hairstylist. “The fun became a dollar.”